


Smile For The Pictures

by LovlieLittleLies



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Depression, M/M, Milkshakes, Overdose, Suicide, larry stylinson - Freeform, suicidal!harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-10 00:31:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3270050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LovlieLittleLies/pseuds/LovlieLittleLies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty-one pills and a colorful memory, that’s what Louis left him with. It’s not enough to function, but it’ll be enough for him tonight.</p>
<p>Basically Harry's very desperate after Louis is gone and there's pills in the house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smile For The Pictures

**Author's Note:**

> IM SORRY IM A BAD PERSON   
> This hurt to write and I may or may not have cried. Six times. oops.  
> Sorry if this causes any emotional anguish.
> 
> MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING: this is kind of 100% a suicide/overdose fic so please don't read if this will trigger any bad feelings.
> 
> As per usual, these are events of my fucked up imagination and are in no way based off of real happenings or people. (As much as I wish I owned One Direction, I do not.) All mistakes are my own.

Harry’s sitting on the couch when he first realizes what he wants. 

His fingers are raw and bleeding from the number of paper cuts he’s acquired over the last few months, but he’s honestly past caring. The pictures are important, so he can suffer through the little sting that shoots through his hands whenever he grabs something. These pictures are a part of him, just like the memories they represent.

He swears he remembers them all. Flipping through the glossy images, it doesn’t matter if he remembers every second because he remembers how he felt at every second- alive, full, happy. He remembers the swirl he got in his stomach and the way his cheeks and lungs and sides ached from laughing so hard. There are days when he really wishes he didn’t remember and days when he wants to melt his own skin off so it won’t be the same skin Louis touched.

But he remembers that too. The physical attraction he had to Louis is possibly the harshest memory. It’s crazy, but he can still feel every little touch and movement. He feels Louis’s hands pressing into his thighs. He feels Louis’s arms around him when he wakes up every morning. He feels the brush of lips, the ghost of fingertips across his skin that promised so much love and care. He can hear the things whispered in his ear at three in the morning when they were drunk and supposed to be asleep. He can hear the laughter bouncing off the walls of their flat. He can hear the sniffles and sobs when everything came crashing down on top of him.

So he doesn’t need the photo album in his lap to remember Louis, but he has it anyways. There’s a picture marking everything they ever did, from the birthdays and celebrations to the insignificant things that wouldn’t matter to anyone but him. (They used to matter to Louis, too, is what he thinks, but that’s beside the point.) They were all taken for this moment, even if Harry never realized it. Every single picture he’s ever taken of them was for this exact point in time. Nobody ever questioned why he started carrying a camera everywhere and taking pictures of everything that ever happened, because everything was new and exciting and it was just a habit they all shared in the beginning. When you visit a beautiful place, you take pictures, right? Well, that’s what Harry was doing. He was capturing the sounds and touches that he felt then because he always knew this would happen. He knew Louis would get sick of him and leave, and so he built himself a safe haven out of pictures and memories. 

He reviews theses mementos every night. When he’s home alone and he can’t get warm, he settles down on the sofa with the boxes and books and loose pictures and sews himself back together. He uses these as his only connection to real feelings. Any if pain is the only real feeling he has left, well, screw everything. It’s still something.

He’s on his feel before he knows what he’s thinking. The pictures bend and fold and fly across the room to settle on the floor, but he doesn’t care. He watches one fall upside down at his feet, the one marked with a date from their days on X Factor. He knows exactly which one it is because one of the corners has a little tear in it, and if he flipped it over he knows what he’d see. Zayn took the picture, probably to tease them later, but it’s sixteen year old Harry curled up in a ball with eighteen year old Louis wrapped around him protectively.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there. It’s well over an hour, he knows that much. His feet ache but he barely feels it because his whole body has the tingly feeling he gets when he’s been in a crowd of happy people for too long. He’s elated, his grin a perfect match to the crescent moon that’s lighting his living room. There’s screams and cheers all around him, and thousands of sweaty bodies, and four sets of limbs curling around him, and he can look out at the sea of the arena, and then…

And then the moment has come to pass and he moves on from the theater in his mind. The moon is shining on his feet now, and his ecstatic smile slinks into a Cheshire Cat smirk. His legs carry him into his bathroom, where he begins shuffling things around into their proper places.

Harry remembers when the bathroom was a mess. There’s three bathrooms in this flat, but nobody used the other two more than once a week. The countertops are permanently sticky from hair products and toothpaste, and Harry wants things where he remembers them. Oh, yeah, he remembers. Louis’s favorite hair spray in the corner of the cabinet beside the sink, a tube of Arctic Mint toothpaste laying at an angle in the drawer, the green hairbrush facing up and practically falling into the marble sink. Harry doesn’t relax until the room looks identical to the way Louis kept it.

Maybe relax is a bad word for that sentence. Harry doesn’t relax because ‘relax’ is no longer in his vocabulary, but he discontinues the jittery, frantic movements he was using before with a heaving sigh. He digs through the baskets of neatly assorted medical bottles- the one thing Louis would never touch in this bathroom- until he comes to the heavy duty narcotics that were subscribed to Louis last September. That’s what he was essentially looking for. (And isn’t it just fitting that the first thing he sees is Louis’s full name in big, bold letters? He almost laughs, really.)

There’s a bottle of Norco with seven pills, another of Vicodin with eleven, and a third with three Demerol. Twenty-one, he thinks to himself as he dumps the other two into the original bottle. Twenty-one pills and a colorful memory, that’s what Louis left him with. It’s not enough to function, but it’ll be enough for him tonight.

The bottle goes on the bedside table with his phone. Once everything is in its place, Harry starts cleaning. The flat is already really pristine because he can’t stand visual chaos to match his internal chaos, so it only takes half an hour to get the place shiny and sterile. He sweeps and vacuums the floors quickly, does the three dishes in the sink, and uses a bottle of bleach to wipe down the surfaces. He wants-

Harry wants this flat to look as perfect as it did when he stood between Louis and a real estate agent, giggling and twirling and declaring just how perfect it was. 

But we can’t have everything, can we? This flat will never look like that again because the light on that day had a lot less to do with the floor-to-ceiling windows than it did with the way Louis grinned and spun Harry under his arm. And, truly, how could anything ever compare to Louis’s radiant smile? 

It can’t, Harry tells himself as he heads back to the kitchen. He deposits the cleaning supplies in the hall closet on his way and then washes the chemicals away from his skin. Once his hands are rid of the bleach-y clean smell, he collects the things he’ll need for a chocolate milkshake and turns the blender on. 

As he thinks about milkshakes and Louis, he washes every dish he just used- beside the champagne glass that is currently holding a chocolate milkshake. There’s been many milkshakes over Harry’s nearly twenty-one years, but none could be better than Louis’s. (Louis liked strawberry better. Chocolate was only made on a day when Harry was feeling down, and only in secret so Louis could bring it up to him in bed with a huge smile). Milkshakes hurt, but they’re his favourite. So, milkshakes. He even adds a dollop of whipped cream to the top, because why the fuck not?

He climbs the stirs again, shake in hand, and slides between the covers of his bed. He waits until he’s completely comfortable to dump as many pills as he can fit into his mouth and swallow them with the milkshake, chocolate glazing his taste buds and dulling the sting of the large gulp he has to take to get it all down. This process is repeated three times, and then he finishes the milkshake and sets the glass beside the empty script bottle.

Harry picks up his cell phone, turns over so he’s comfortable, and lets the world get warm and fuzzy around him. Everything’s slow, but his head is absolutely splitting open with words that need to be said, so he does something he hasn’t done in weeks. He texts Louis. 

‘I want you to know that I love you. Okay? I love you, Louis Tomlinson, more than anything in the damn world. I’ll always love you.’

He sends that, but doesn’t stop.

‘This isn’t you. We aren’t your fault. Promise me you’ll always remember. Promise you know we weren’t your fault. Please? For me? Promise?’ Send.

How could Louis make a promise when he hasn’t even read these messages? Harry doesn’t care. Well, he does, but his brain is too fuzzy for him to think that through. 

‘This doesn’t hurt at all, I want you to know that because I know you’ll worry that it hurt me. I used those pills you got when you knee was hurt, and I made a milkshake. It wasn’t as good as yours, but it was better than the regret I’ve been tasting on my tongue for months.’ Send.

By now, Harry’s vision is getting a little hard to work around. It’s getting hard to see the tiny screen with the black invading the inner circles of his sight, but he’s been working through it. 

‘It’s getting dark and I can’t really see, Lou. I’ve gotta go. Sorry.’ Send. 

And one last, just before the ‘delivered’ symbol changes to ‘read 12:21 AM’ 

‘Love you always. Always in my heart, baby. Xx.’

And if the last thing he hears is a sloppy recording of Louis singing My Only Sunshine that was set as Louis’s special ringtone in his phone two years ago, well. That’s just too damn bad, isn’t it? And if the last thing he sees before he shuts his eyes is the contact ID of Louis kissing his cheek while he displays a real smile last year on his phone, well.

That’s just too damn bad.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I love you all! This started as 800 words and I don't really know where it went, so hopefully someone enjoyed. xx


End file.
